Today, instructional designers at community colleges have exciting opportunities to improve instruction and service to students, as their toolkit has grown to include an amazing array of Web 2.0 tools and new media. CT asked Michael Medlock, the director of Instructional Design and Technology at Rio Salado College how instructional designers and a team of faculty, subject matter experts, and media developers follow instructional design principles and strategies that leverage technology and new media to create robust learning designs that advance instruction at Rio Salado College.

Texas A&M and Tulane University will be among the first universities to adopt the "Voice in the Cloud" managed service being offered by the educational communications networking consortium Internet2 in collaboration with telecommunications vendors Aastra and Level 3 Communications.